Professional Development

#DOES20 Reflections

I usually try to write these Three Things I’ve Learned posts at the end of each day of a conference, but this is a little different. This is the first multi-day virtual training event I’ve been to, and because it’s virtual, there’s no travel. Which means my day begins on EDT, and the conference starts (and ends) on PDT. Makes for a very long day.

That being said, I love this conference: DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020 continues to push me to think abstractly about technological problems, and grounds me again in looking at cultural issues within my organization. These are the three things that have resonated with me (so far):

  1. I’ve got to do more to make the pain visible across the organization. Lots of folks have stressed the necessity of communication across teams, disciplines, and to the upper management, and that’s really sticking out to me. I think we’ve done a decent job of complaining, but we haven’t done the best job of proposing better ways of solving problems.
  2. I need to celebrate my team’s victories more. My team works hard, and there are moments when they feel forgotten in the grand scheme of things, particularly when other teams are holding them back. I need to make sure that they realize how much change they’ve promoted, and how far we’ve come as an organization.
  3. Set the Vision, but focus on the first step. A few years ago when I started us on this journey, I laid out a vision, and I need to revisit that. A lot has changed, including both targets we hit, and goals that are no longer on the roadmap. I need to make sure that I frame each step along the way in terms of the value it brings to the service we’re offering.

Virtual conferences are a different kind of fatigue; it’s been rough staying focused. I think I’m going to write another blog post to describe what’s worked for me, and what I’ll do differently in the future.

Back to learning; 3 more hours to go today 🙂

2020-10-14 by Uncategorized 0

#DOES2020 starts tomorrow

This is one of my favorite conferences, and obviously COVID-19 changes everything. It’ll be interesting to see how going online changes the tone of the conversation. One big benefit is that the cost is definitely lower while the quality of the content is expected to be the same; I miss traveling, though.

I know most folks have done a virtual conference this year and have already mastered the Zoom burnout, but I’m a little concerned about. I’m going to try and beat it by staying engaged with a co-worker who is also attended. I also plan on live-tweeting and or blogging as it comes.

Getting my learn on.

2020-10-12 by Uncategorized 0

Moving from #WFH to #CoWorking

I’ve been a remote worker for the last 15 years of my career, and I’ve often bragged about how efficient it was to work from home. I could do all sorts of household chores, as well as manage my business needs. Didn’t need to spend three hours commuting round trip each day, and was always available as needed. It’s a great time to work remote, and my company has a good culture for us.

Unfortunately, working from home also led to two major issues for me: distractions during the day, and the never ending day. Distractions were subtle; sometimes it was easier to just zone out rather than dealing with the mountain of paperwork and conference calls awaiting me. The never ending day often resulted from those distractions; because my work is at my house, it was easy just to put off family time and just keep working.

My new office space https://ceocentersflex.com/coworking-space/

I’m trying something radical; I’ve started coworking. I didn’t want to drive three hours to the corporate office, so I’ve found a space that was 20 minutes from my house. I rent a table, have faster internet, and I pack in and out each day. It gives me the opportunity to be around people (so I feel guilty hauling a TV screen in) as well as a definitive end to my day.

It’s been an interesting experiment so far; listening to other people’s conference calls and meetings has been the biggest change\challenge, but in general, I’m getting used to it. I’ll talk more about my gear in a future post, but for the most part, I’ve minimized my work footprint.

2019-09-30 by Blogging is FUN! 0

#SQLSATBR: Database People and #DevOps

Excited to announce that I was chosen to present my session “Database People and DevOps: The Fundamentals” at SQLSaturday Baton Rouge 2019 this August. Very excited to head back close to home this year; I actually attended LSU graduate school for a year before transferring to UGA, so the campus holds a dear place in my heart. SQLSaturday Baton Rouge appears to have grown a lot since the last time I was there, so I’m hoping I can pick ups some ideas for our event in 2020.

This is a fun session for me, and I’ve got some revisions to make after delivering it in Atlanta. I hope folks find it informative, and I give lots of references for future study. This is a summary class, which means I cover a lot of topics at a high level, but I like to build a framework for future study.

Y’all come.

2019-06-14 by Conferences DevOps 0

To be a #DevOps Leader…

…you have to do less work, and do more to improve work.

I know, it’s been said 1000 different ways already, but it sunk in this week as I struggled to put out the bazillionth little forest fire that had crept up after our last deployment.  It’s so easy to get back in the rhythm of doing whatever it takes to keep the system stable, even if it means sacrificing time with family, projects you want to make headway, general health and well-being… IT work is built on the backs of heroes.

But it isn’t sustainable.  I look back over the last month and wonder what the hell it is I accomplished.  My team is worn out; I’m worn out.  We managed to squeak in a major project, but we had to drop the ball on 100 other little things to get it done.  And, to rub salt in the wound, the new project added new work to the backlog, which just means that we may have won the battle, but it’s an expensive win.

My job as a leader is to make sure people know how much wins like that cost; not to discourage them from trying to make a win, but to make better strategic decisions so that we don’t sacrifice something important in order to get some other important thing done.

Monday’s coming, and I’m going to start over. Again.  And i”m going to keep starting over until things get better.

2018-12-07 by Blogging is FUN! Professional Development SQLServerPedia Syndication 0

#DOES18 – Wednesday Takeaways

Last day of the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018, and I had a few aha! moments that really clicked for me.

  1. Jon Hall’s presentation on swarming was a great practical explanation on how to manage swarms.  My team needs to be more available to Tier 1 and Tier 2 to swarm on issues and resolve them.  It’s not quite the same model as the model Jon presented, but it’s a step.
  2. As an organization, we don’t need a plan so much as we need a set of common principles: commitment to communicate (make work visible to teams, management, customers… etc.), and commitment to best practices in development (SOA, Agile, product not project, etc.).  That’s the first step; once we’ve identified those principles, then there needs to be an establishment of processes that reflect those principles.
  3. Uncertainty is good.  We don’t need to stay in a particular mode in so much as we need to find the problem and solve quickly.

Keynotes are up, if you want to check them out.  Great stuff in there.

2018-10-24 by Professional Development SQLServerPedia Syndication 0

#DOES18 – Tuesday Takeaways

Thoughts from yesterday’s DevOps Enterprise Summit in Las Vegas

  1. Managing workflow is different than managing configuration changes or code.  It’s related, but you can have separate systems for individual team’s processes and procedures (i.e., Azure DevOps for developers, ServiceNow for ops), but you want to make work visible to all affected teams.
  2. Making work visible was a theme I heard over and over again; so much of the “throw it over the wall” mentality stems from the fact that ops does magic. 
  3. Processes are necessary, but they must be as light as possible or they won’t meet the need (they get in the way of rapid response).  People often adapt by ditching the process anyway.
2018-10-24 by Blogging is FUN! Conferences Professional Development SQLServerPedia Syndication 0

#DOES18 – Monday Takeaways

This is a quick post; I meant to get this pulled together last night, but hey, I’m in Vegas.  There were things to do, so I’m hammering it out before the morning sessions start.  As always, this is a fantastic conference; it really shifts the focus away from specific technological solutions to understanding why technology is important to delivering business value.  In no specific order, here are my key takeaways from yesterday:

  1. I need to do a better job of articulating my vision, and asking my boss (and his boss) to do the same.  What’s the message we want to send to our employees?  To our clients?  To our competition?
  2. Minimum Viable Compliance – we are so process-heavy; how do we convince governance to help us do the right thing, but do it in such a way that it reduces the strain on the system?  Governance as a Service.
  3. Return to our roots- build a service catalog, and use it to describe architecture.  Every single component of the value stream (ideally) should be captured, and used like Lego blocks to define service delivery.
  4. Reliability Engineering needs to be visible.  Keep measurement and reporting simple; start with a rubric, and a pass/fail mentality.  Dedicate time to toil reduction as a team, not as individuals.

Lots more to come, but wanted to get these notes out the door.

2018-10-23 by Blogging is FUN! Professional Development SQLServerPedia Syndication 0

#Azure DataFest Atlanta #ADFATL – Call for Speakers Now Open!

As I’ve mentioned on twitter (what, you don’t follow me?), I’ve been involved with a new conference that’s focusing on the Microsoft Data Platform – Azure DataFest. It’s still very much in the works, but there’ have been a few events around the country so far, and we’re bringing one to Atlanta in August (as well as working on a national standardized presence). If you want to help build a community of data professionals that are passionate about the next generation of analytics and data science, please feel free a topic. Text for the CFP is below, but the actual call for speakers is here: https://sessionize.com/atlanta-2018-azure-datafest-microsoft.

More details to come (after I get through Atlanta SQLSaturday).

Atlanta 2018 Azure DataFest: Microsoft Azure Advanced Analytics and Big Data Conference

This is a call for speakers for the inaugural Atlanta Azure DataFest: Microsoft Azure Advance Analytics and Big Data Conference, a 2-day event to be held on August 16-17, 2018, 9:00AM to 5:00PM at the Microsoft Technology Center, 8000 Avalon Boulevard Suite 900, Alpharetta, GA 30009.

We are looking for 10-12 speakers to present on the following Azure Advanced Analytics and Big Data topics:

  • Azure Data Services
  • Azure Data Warehouse
  • Power BI
  • Cosmos DB
  • Azure Analysis Services
  • HDInsight
  • Machine Learning
  • Stream Analytics
  • Cognitive Services
  • Azure Bot Services
  • Data Lake Analytics
  • Data Lake Store
  • Data Factory
  • Power BI Embedded
  • Data Catalog
  • Log Analytics
  • Apache Spark for Azure
  • Dynamics 365 for Customer Insights
  • Custom Speech Service  APIs
  • Spark

Planned Schedule (Thursday, August 16)        

We plan on delivering a keynote, and three sessions to the at-large audience, then breaking into tracks after lunch.

8:00AM – 9:00AM – check-in/breakfast/networking

9:00AM – 9:50AM – Key Note, Room # All/Combined

10:00AM -10:50AM – Session 1  Room # All/Combined

11:00AM -11:50AM – Session 2 Room # All/Combined

12:00PM – 12:50PM – Partner/Sponsor Lunch and Learn – Room # All/Combined

1:15PM – 2:15PM  Breakout sessions

2:30PM – 3:30PM  Breakout sessions

3:45PM – 4:45PM Breakout sessions

Sessions should be 1 hour in duration, level 300 or higher. You can use best practices, case studies, demos, chalk talks, etc.

Planned Schedule (Friday, August 17)
The second day is intended to build on the first day with workshops, allowing attendees to have hands-on experiences with the applications.

8:00AM – 9:00AM – check-in/breakfast/networking

9:00AM – 11:50AM Workshops

12:00PM – 12:50PM – Lunch – Networking

1:00PM – 3:50PM Workshops

Workshop sessions should be 3 hours in length, and relate to material covered in the sessions on day one.  If you would like to submit a workshop session,  please ALSO submit a single-hour session for the first day.

The session submission deadline is Friday, July 13, 2018.  We will announce the speaker list and alternates on Monday, July 16, 2018.     

If you have questions, please contact stuart.ainsworth@azuredatafest.com

2018-05-12 by Code SQLServerPedia Syndication 0

#DevOps – Lead by example, but set the right example.

Last weekend, I missed a data center migration.

It was a scheduling conflict; for Christmas last year, my wife had bought me tickets to High Water music festival (which was great, btw), and when they set the dates for the data center migration, I was worried. The tickets were expensive, and we had booked hotels, etc; I couldn’t change plans to work with the schedule, and there were too many teams involved in the migration for them to pick a different date. We’d done this migration once before (6 months ago), and I was confident in my team’s ability, but still… I was worried. You see, missing an after-hours deployment or a maintenance window of this size wasn’t usually considered to be an option before (by me). I’ve always been a firm believer in the management rule of: Don’t Ask Others to Do Something You Won’t Do.

So, every migration, every deployment, every maintenance window… I was there. Weekends, mornings, evenings… I was there. When our first major data center migration blew up a year ago, I was there for 26 hours. I THOUGHT I was sending the message that “I’m here for you… I’m leading the way… I’m being a team player.”

That’s not the message I was sending.

What happened while I was away is that others stepped up and filled the void left in my absence. They didn’t do things exactly like I would have done, and they had to take on some additional responsibilities during the migration, so their timing wasn’t as efficient as if I had been there. But the work got done, and we survived without me. I could have looked at that and said “aha; I’m not really necessary; there’s some waste savings there!”. Instead, I realized that what I thought was a four-person job was really a three person job, and that meant that the fourth person could do what was more important than work; life.

You see, the message that I was sending by being at every activity outside of work was that I Expect Y’All to Give Up Your Free Time for Your Job, Just Like I Do. I didn’t mean it that way, but my employees picked up on it. I was there; they were there. Every time. And that’s no way to work.

What I realized this weekend is that Leading By Example also means Resting By Example. If the job really is a three person job, then four people don’t need to show up to do it (or else work will expand to make it a four person job; a variant of Parkinson’s law). And while I should still be willing to do the job, I need to be willing to do it when it’s my turn. I’m now scheduling rotations (I’m in one of those rotations as an engineer), and letting my team understand that it’s not just OK to not be at every maintenance window activity; it’s expected. A job is what you do to pay the bills and enjoy life. If I believe that for myself, then I need to set that example for my team as well.

2018-04-26 by Blogging is FUN! DevOps SQLServerPedia Syndication 0